Re: Linux Console in UTF-8 - current state

[Tomohiro KUBOTA <tkubota@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

At Sun, 29 Sep 2002 03:30:47 -0500 (CDT),
starner@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> It _is_ too large to be included. The kernel should include a Latin-1
> font (for backwards-compatiblity) and let the user to load a large
> font if they want.

Though I don't understand where is the borderline of "too large" and
not too large, I understand your idea to limit font to backward-
compatibility range, i.e., Latin-1.

In this idea, kernel will have only ability to handle UTF-8, and fonts
will be supplied in another packages (like Linux Console Tools) if users
need more than Latin-1 (like Euro).  Since most Linux distributions
will have such "another package", I think this is reasonable.

I hope the kernel's "ability" will include support of zero-width and
double-width characters.

Anyway, what I hate is to divide people into two classes, people who
don't need additional files/settings and people who need them.
Japanese users were always forced to read books to configure softwares
to be able to handle Japanese.  I strongly hope that Unicode will
equalize peoples in the world.  To achieve this, we should not spoil
the advantage of Unicode to ISO-2022 --- the unified character set ---
by spliting the code space and saying "this code space is needed, that
is optional".

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@xxxxxxxxxx>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/